The American West

86 galleries

A collection of galleries from the American West, mostly Arizona but also Utah, New Mexico and Montana. Some feature stories, like rodeo, some Native American stories and some news stories, like immigration, are represented here.

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About 100 soldiers of A (Alpha) Company of the 422nd Expeditionary Signal Battalion (referred to as "Alpha 4-2-2") of the Arizona Army National Guard returned to Arizona on Sunday, Jan. 15, following a nearly year-long deployment to Afghanistan. More than 10,000 Arizona Army and Air National Guard Soldiers and Airmen have been ordered to federal active duty in support of Operations Noble Eagle, Enduring Freedom, Iraqi Freedom, and New Dawn since September 2001. Approximately 200 Arizona National Guard Soldiers and Airmen are still serving on federal active duty overseas.

I've been photographing Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his jails for about 10 years. The Sheriff has been a lightning rod for controversy in the state of Arizona for almost his entire tenure. He is one of the most popular politicians and most powerful Republicans in the state. He campaigns as a tough, no nonsense lawman and claims the nickname of "America's Toughest Sheriff." But human rights activists and many on the left complain that the Sheriff and his department routinely deny people their constitutionally guaranteed civil rights, engages in racial profiling and uses his office to intimidate political opponents.
On Dec. 15, 2011, the US Department of Justice issued a report highly critical of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department and the Sheriff's jails and supported many of his opponents' claims. The DOJ said the Sheriff's Dept. engages in widespread discrimination against Latinos during traffic stops and immigration enforcement, violates the rights of Spanish speaking prisoners in the jails and retaliates against the Sheriff's political opponents.
These are some of the photos I've made of the Sheriff's operations over the years.

Virgin of Guadalupe Day is celebrated on December 12 across Latin America and in Hispanic communities in the US.
Phoenix has a large Hispanic community and celebrates Virgin of Guadalupe Day on the first Saturday in December, combining it with "Honor Your Mother" day. Thousands of local Catholic process through downtown to honor the Virgin.
These photos were made at the 2011 procession.

They say the best camera is the one you have with you. Lately, I've been using my iPhone 4 to make photos of things I see on daily walks through my neighborhood in central Phoenix. The signs of the "Great Recession" are everywhere in this part of town - in the shuttered businesses, abandoned buildings and the homeless who sleep in the shadows.

The Healing Field, a display of nearly 3,000 American flags, has become an annual tradition in Tempe, AZ, to mark the 9-11 attacks on New York and Washington. This year's display has solemnity because it is the 10th anniversary of the attack.

A "haboob" or dust storm hit the Phoenix area Thursday. A haboob (Arabic for "strong wind") is a type of intense duststorm commonly observed in arid regions throughout the world. They have been observed in the Sahara desert, the Arabian Peninsula, throughout Kuwait, and most arid regions of Iraq. In the USA, they are frequently observed in the deserts of Arizona, including Yuma and Phoenix, as well as New Mexico and Texas. "Haboob" has been widely used to describe dust storms for more than a generation In Arizona but this year the very word "haboob" has become a political football because some conservatives have lobbied against use of the word, favoring English words, like "dust storm."

About 200 people showed up at Heritage Square in downtown Phoenix Saturday morning for a flash mob coordinated by the Arizona Science Center. The mob danced to several hip-hop songs before disbanding. The event was a part of National Dance Day Activities and the First Lady's "Let's Move!" physical fitness campaign.

Ok Phansa Day marks the end of Buddhist Lent and falls on the full moon of the eleventh lunar month - Oct 23 in 2010. In Thailand, the day is marked by thousands of people visiting temples and making vast donations to the monks.
At Wat Pa in Chandler, about 100 people, Thais and Westerners, brought rice and Thai delicacies to the monks, who led the people in chants and prayers.

Ibrahim Swara-Dahab owns the Goat Meat Store in Phoenix, AZ. Swara-Dahab came to the United States from Somalia in 1998. He has built a thriving business as a Halal butcher and provides freshly butchered goats and sheep killed following the precepts of Muslim tradition. His business not only caters to Muslims in the Phoenix area but also to refugees and immigrants from Africa and Asia. His small butcher shop is on the Gila River Indian Reservation, about 100 yards from the Phoenix city limits and doesn't have either running water or electricity.

About 300 people gathered at the Phoenix Police Department headquarters building Monday night to protest the shooting of Daniel Rodriguez and his dog. Phoenix officers responded to a 911 call made by Rodriguez' mother. A scuffle ensued when they arrived and Phoenix police officer Richard Chrisman shot Rodriguez, who was unarmed, and his dog. Chrisman then allegedly filed a false report about the event. He has been arrested on felony assault charges. The event has angered some in the Latino community and they have held a series of protests at the police headquarters. They want Chrisman charged with murder.

Crime has steadily dropped in Phoenix over the past few years, in line with national trends. The latest number released this month showed Phoenix reported fewer homicides, rapes, robberies, thefts in 2010 despite the bad economy. The department says that at least part of the credit for the crime drop is attributable to the efforts of the Major Offenders Bureau, an elite squad of detectives that spends its days tracking the down the worst of the criminals living in Phoenix and makes anywhere from four to eight felony arrests every day.
(THESE PHOTOS ARE NOT AVAILABLE FOR SALE OR REUSE)

More than 3,000 Muslims from the Phoenix area attended Eid ul-Fitr services in Glendale, AZ, Sept 10, 2010.
Eid ul-Fitr, often abbreviated to Eid, is the Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting. Eid is an Arabic word meaning "festivity", while Fitr means "conclusion of the fast"; and so the holiday symbolizes the celebration of the conclusion of the month of fasting from dawn to sunset during the entire month of Ramadan. The first day of Eid, therefore, is the first day of the month Shawwal that comes after Ramadan.

The Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge is the largest construction project in the Western US right now.
US Highway 93 runs from Phoenix to Las Vegas. It's a NAFTA corridor and is heavily used by trucks bringing goods from Mexico into the US. It's also a popular weekend get away run for Phoenicians who want to play the tables in Sin City.
The highway becomes a parking lot as it approaches Hoover Dam. The switchbacks and narrow approaches slow traffic and the pedestrians and rubber neckers on the dam are a hazard to traffic. In the wake of 9/11 there are also security checkpoints on either end of the dam. It can take an hour to travel the five miles between security checkpoints.
The massive bridge is supposed to relieve the congestion and allow folks who don't want to dawdle on the dam to get quickly and easily from Point A to Point B.
The bridge is scheduled to open in November 2010. It's more than 1,000 feet long, 1,500 feet southwest of the dam and more than 900 feet above the Colorado River. It's been under construction since 2005.

The Arizona Cardinals, the Bad News Bears of the NFL, played in their first Superbowl last weekend. No one expected them to win and some sports pundits called them the worst team to make the playoffs. But to the Cardinals credit, they played a great game. They lost, but they beat the point spread and acquitted themselves in the eyes of the national media.
They came home Monday afternoon to a hero's welcome. More than 4,000 people stood on the tarmac at the airport and let out thunderous applause as the players walked from the plane to waiting buses.

Pigs have learned to fly. Hell has frozen over. The earth is no longer spinning on its axis. The Arizona Cardinals are playing in the Super Bowl.
If I had to pick just one of those to actually happen I never would have picked the Cardinals. But it's true. After 111 years as a pro franchise, the Arizona Cardinals, a team that has relished its mediocrity is playing in the Super Bowl. These photos were made during a pep rally at Sky Harbor Airport after the Cardinals left for Tampa to face the Steelers.

Donald Trapani has lung cancer and is in the care of Hospice of the Valley, the largest hospice organization in the Phoenix area, but he doesn't let that stop him from entertaining others. Each week he dons a white jump suit like the one Elvis Presley used to wear and visits nursing homes and hospice units to entertain the patients.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is proud of his tough, no nonsense, reputation as "America's Toughest Sheriff." On his way to earning that title he's created three chain gangs. One men's, one women's and one juvenile. He says it's proof that he's "an equal opportunity incarcerator."
The chain gangs do a variety of public service tasks, like cleaning up vacant lots. But their most famous task is burying the poor of Maricopa County.
On alternating weeks, the men's and women's chain gangs go out to White Tanks Cemetery west of Phoenix and inter the homeless and indigent who die in the county in what has become Maricopa County's "potter's field."
This is a selection of photos I've made of the Sheriff's chain gangs. There are more photos in the archives.

James Arthur Ray is a controversial self help guru who leads "Spiritual Warrior" retreats that cost $8,000 per person to attend. The retreats include ceremonies borrowed from Native American traditions, like sweat lodges.
In October 2009, three people died in a sweat lodge in Sedona, AZ, during a Ray retreat. Investigations into the cause of the deaths started immediately and law enforcement in Yavapai County, AZ, (Sedona is in Yavapai county) determined that Ray was responsible for the deaths and charged him with manslaughter. He was arrested on Feb 3 and is being held at the Yavapai County Detention Center in Camp Verde.
I photographed Ray's initial appearance on Feb. 4. These are photos from that day.

Phoenix hosted one of the anti-tax "Tea Parties" April 15. About 8,000 people, a huge crowd by Phoenix standards, came down to the state capitol, some with tea bags, most without, to protest Barrack Obama's economic and tax policies. As the protest went on it turned into a protest against all things Obama.
There are more photos in my archive.

Veterans, the VA and Messinger's Mortuaries came together Tuesday to inter the cremated remains of 36 veterans of the US military. The remains were unclaimed or their families couldn't be located and had been in storage. Tuesday they were interred at the National Cemetery in Phoenix.

Mexico's coffee industry has been crippled by low global prices for coffee, even as demand has skyrocketed. Mexican coffee has never had the caché of Kona (Hawaii) or Blue Mountain (Jamaica) or the commercial success of Colombian. But in the last few years, as cheap coffee from Vietnam and Brazil has flooded the market Mexican growers have found it hard to hang on.
To see more photos from the Mexican coffee industry search my archive using keywords: coffee or Tapachula.

These are some of my favorite photos from 2012. There are a number of political photos in this collection - I enjoy photographing the political process. There are also photos from Vietnam, the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona and a lot of photos from Thailand, where I am now.

Several hundred volunteers and veterans gathered at the National Memorial Cemetery of Arizona in Phoenix Saturday to lay Christmas wreaths on headstones, a tradition started by Wreaths Across America. Wreaths Across America is a nonprofit organization founded to continue and expand the annual wreath laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery begun by Maine businessman, Morrill Worcester, in 1992.

The Arizona Diamondbacks hosted a Lucha Libre exhibition in front of Chase Field to mark Hispanic Heritage Day Sunday. This year, it coincided with September 16th, Mexico's official Independence Day celebration.

The Exchange Club of Tempe and the city of Tempe are hosting the 9th Annual Healing Field display. The annual event posts three thousand American flags in the Tempe Beach Park. The display is a tribute to those who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Nearly 3,000 people were killed when terrorists affiliated Al-Qaeda crashed commercial airliners into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Arlington, VA, and a field in Ohio.

About 40 people marched through central Phoenix Sunday to call for a constitutional amendment to give women the same right to go shirtless in public that men have. The Phoenix demonstration was a part of a national Topless Day of Protest. Phoenix prohibits women from going topless in public so protesters, women and men, covered their nipples and areolas with tape. The men did it to show solidarity with the women marchers.

Six people were killed and three injured during a massacre at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin Sunday. The killer had numerous links to racist hate groups. On Tuesday night about 60 people from the Arizona Interfaith Movement came together for a brief service in memory of the victims of the massacre.

Medea Benjamin a cofounder of both CODEPINK and the international human rights organization Global Exchange was in Phoenix recently to promote her book, Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, and to present a letter to Gov. Jan Brewer asking that Brewer not promote Arizona's airspace as a training area for drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

The Navajo Nation Camp Meeting is held in Ft. Defiance, a small community north of Window Rock, every year on the second weekend of July. Nearly 1,000 people came to this year's meeting and pledged their lives to Christ.

Bull riding, the most extreme of the extreme sports, is a popular past time on the Navajo reservation in northwest Arizona. The reservation, the largest Native American reservation in the United States, stretches across the high desert of New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. What people think of as the heart of the Old West. Cowboying and rodeo isn't just a notion here, it's a way of life.
These Navajo cowboys spent a couple of days perfecting (or in some cases just learning) to ride bulls.

Prescott, about two hours north of Phoenix, has one of the best Fourth of July Parades in Arizona. It's got all the Independence Day trappings - flags, cowboys, horses, costumes and great weather. The smell of grilling meat mixes easily with the smell of SPF 50 sunscreen.

The Senior Fiesta Dancers are a group of Glendale senior citizens who get together to stay fit through Mexican folkloric style dancing. They get together every week for a couple of hours of a very aerobic folkloric dancing and friendship.

Arizona marked the state's centennial with a day long party at the State Capitol Tuesday.
There were cup cakes, entertainment from artists as diverse as Rex Allen Jr., (son of Rex Allen the cowboy singer and movie star), Itzhak Perlman and Wayne Newton.
There was also a mass wedding on the steps of the Supreme Court.

The Grand Canyon Professional Rodeo Association, an Arizona based pro rodeo circuit, held its finals at Rawhide in Chandler, AZ, this weekend.
Rodeo is the original extreme sport steeped in the ranching traditions of the American west and heavily influenced by Mexican rodeos, called Charreadas.

The Grand Canyon is one of the Wonders of the World. The colors of the canyon's walls change as the sun moves through the sky. Spanish conquistadors were the first Europeans to see the canyon in 1540, but the steep walls and rugged terrain stymied them. It wasn't until John Wesley Powell rafted down the Colorado River in 1869 that the canyon was mapped.
Now it's one of the most popular national parks in the United States. Hundreds of thousands people visit the Canyon every year. Despite the crowds, it's a place of mystery and majesty.

The National Rifle Association's 138th annual meeting was held in Phoenix, AZ this year. More than 60,000 people, from across the US, attended the extravaganza of guns, ammunition and sports shooting supplies.
The booths that displayed military style firearms and semiautomatic handguns were extremely busy at the convention as many gun owners expressed concern about the Obama administration's policies on gun ownership.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has gotten national attention for his high profile "crime suppression" sweeps which he uses as anti-immigrant sweeps, flooding Hispanic neighborhoods looking for undocumented immigrants. Some in Maricopa County praise the sheriff for the sweeps. Others in the county, including the mayor of Phoenix, condemn him for the sweeps, calling them racist and racial profiling.
The sweeps have also gotten lots of national attention, including the attention of civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton.
Rev. Sharpton came to Phoenix this week to protest the sweeps and join the chorus of voices condemning the sweeps.
There were demonstrations against Sharpton and Arpaio at their respective venues during Sharpton's visit.

Horse racing on the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona is not like horse racing you've seen at the track or on television. It's a throwback to the days of the old west. Members of the Nation, with their horses, gather in a meadow, usually off the beaten path, on the reservation and then race their horses. Some races are short - maybe a couple of miles, some are much longer - 10 - 15 miles.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio tries to cast himself as an "Old West" sheriff. The quickest gun in the west, toughest guy in town. He calls himself "America's Toughest Sheriff."
For the last year or two, the sheriff has been rounding up people he suspects of being in the US illegally and handing them over to ICE to be deported. This has angered many in the Latino community.
Saturday, Feb. 28, thousands of people marched through the streets of Phoenix to protest the Sheriff's actions.

Phoenix used to take perverse pride in being the largest city in the US without a decent mass transit system. That's starting to change. On Saturday, Dec. 27, Phoenix and the suburban communities of Tempe and Mesa marked the grand opening of METRO, the Valley's new 20 mile light rail system.

I've been documenting immigration for years, from illegal or undocumented immigrants, to citizenship ceremonies to the impact of immigration on communities in Mexico. I've photographed immigration stories in Mexico, the US, Guatemala, Thailand, Burma (Myanmar) and beyond.

These are all of the photos I've made in Phoenix. If you're looking for something from the immigration debate, the housing market crash or simple travel features from the Valley of the Sun chances are I have something here.

The Navajo Nation is the largest Indian Reservation in the United States. It encompasses parts of three of the most arid states in the US; Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.
Water is essential for life, yet despite the presence of major rivers like the Colorado and San Juan on the reservation, the Navajos have never been able to get enough of it to meet their needs. Thousand of Navajo have to haul water, at great expense, from distant wells to their homes.
A Federal study showed that the total cost of hauling water was about $113 per 1,000 gallons. A Phoenix household, in comparison, pays just $5 a month for up to 7,400 gallons of water. The lack of water on the reservation means the Navajo are among the most miserly users of water in the United States. Families that have to buy or haul water use only about 15 gallons of water per day per person. In Phoenix, by comparison, the average water use is about 170 gallons per day.
These photos, and others from this story, are available from ZUMA Press.

Celestial marriage, what members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, call polygamy, is a central tenet of their faith. They split from the mainstream LDS (Mormon) church after the Mormons banned polygamy in the late 1890's.
Members of the FLDS live in a remote enclave on the Arizona/Utah state line in the twin towns of Colorado City, AZ and Hildale, UT. They've tried to stay out of the limelight, but what they consider persecution from state and federal authorities have kept them in the spotlight.
More photos of the Jessop family in Colorado City/Hildale are available from my archive. Do a keyword search: Jessop on my archive to see more.